The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Many of us rely on the search volume numbers Google AdWords provides, but those numbers ought to be consumed with a hearty helping of skepticism. Broad and unusable volume ranges, misalignment with other Google tools, and conflating similar yet intrinsically distinct keywords — these are just a few of the serious issues that make relying on AdWords search volume data alone so dangerous. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we discuss those issues in depth and offer a few alternatives for more accurate volume data.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about Google AdWords' keyword data and why it is absolutely insane as an SEO or as a content marketer or a content creator to rely on this.

Look, as a paid search person, you don't have a whole lot of choice, right? Google and Facebook combine to form the duopoly of advertising on the internet. But as an organic marketer, as a content marketer or as someone doing SEO, you need to do something fundamentally different than what paid search folks are doing. Paid search folks are basically trying to figure out when will Google show my ad for a keyword that might create the right kind of demand that will drive visitors to my site who will then convert?

But as an SEO, you're often driving traffic so that you can do all sorts of other things. The same with content marketers. You're driving traffic for multitudes of reasons that aren't directly or necessarily directly connected to a conversion, at least certainly not right in that visit. So there are lots reasons why you might want to target different types of keywords and why AdWords data will steer you wrong.

1. AdWords' "range" is so broad, it's nearly useless

First up, AdWords shows you this volume range, and they show you this competition score. Many SEOs I know, even really smart folks just I think haven't processed that AdWords could be misleading them in this facet.

So let's talk about what happened here. I searched for types of lighting and lighting design, and Google AdWords came back with some suggestions. This is in the keyword planner section of the tool. So "types of lighting," "lighting design", and "lighting consultant," we'll stick with those three keywords for a little bit.

I can see here that, all right, average monthly searches, well, these volume ranges are really unhelpful. 10k to 100k, that's just way too giant. Even 1k to 10k, way too big of a range. And competition, low, low, low. So this is only true for the quantity of advertisers. That's really the only thing that you're seeing here. If there are many, many people bidding on these keywords in AdWords, these will be high.

But as an example, for "types of light," there's virtually no one bidding, but for "lighting consultant," there are quite a few people bidding. So I don't understand why these are both low competition. There's not enough granularity here, or Google is just not showing me accurate data. It's very confusing.

By the way, "types of light," though it has no PPC ads right now in Google's results, this is incredibly difficult to rank for in the SEO results. I think I looked at the keyword difficulty score. It's in the 60s, maybe even low 70s, because there's a bunch of powerful sites. There's a featured snippet up top. The domains that are ranking are doing really well. So it's going to be very hard to rank for this, and yet competition low, it's just not telling you the right thing. That's not telling you the right story, and so you're getting misled on both competition and monthly searches.

2. AdWords doesn't line up to reality, or even Google Trends!

Worse, number two, AdWords doesn't line up to reality with itself. I'll show you what I mean.

So let's go over to Google Trends. Great tool, by the way. I'm going to talk about that in a second. But I plugged in "lighting design," "lighting consultant," and "types of lighting." I get the nice chart that shows me seasonality. But over on the left, it also shows average keyword volume compared to each other — 86 for "lighting design," 2 for "lighting consultant," and 12 for "types of lighting." Now, you tell me how it is that this can be 43 times as big as this one and this can be 6 times as big as that one, and yet these are all correct.

The math only works in some very, very tiny amounts of circumstances, like, okay, maybe if this is 1,000 and this is 12,000, which technically puts it in the 10k, and this is 86,000 — well, no wait, that doesn't quite work — 43,000, okay, now we made it work. But you change this to 2,000 or 3,000, the numbers don't add up. Worse, it gets worse, of course it does. When AdWords gets more specific with the performance data, things just get so crazy weird that nothing lines up.

So what I did is I created ad groups, because in AdWords in order to get more granular monthly search data, you have to actually create ad groups and then go review those. This is in the review section of my ad group creation. I created ad groups with only a single keyword so that I could get the most accurate volume data I could, and then I maximized out my bid until I wasn't getting any more impressions by bidding any higher.

Well, whether that truly accounts for all searches or not, hard to say. But here's the impression count — 2,500 a day, 330 a day, 4 a day. So 4 a day times 30, gosh, that sounds like 120 to me. That doesn't sound like it's in the 1,000 to 10,000 range. I don't think this could possibly be right. It just doesn't make any sense.

What's happening? Oh, actually, this is "types of lighting." Google clearly knows that there are way more searches for this. There's a ton more searches for this. Why is the impression so low? The impressions are so low because Google will rarely ever show an ad for that keyword, which is why when we were talking, above here, about competition, I didn't see an ad for that keyword. So again, extremely misleading.

If you're taking data from AdWords and you're trying to apply it to your SEO campaigns, your organic campaigns, your content marketing campaigns, you are being misled and led astray. If you see numbers like this that are coming straight from AdWords, "Oh, we looked at the AdWords impression," know that these can be dead f'ing wrong, totally misleading, and throw your campaigns off.

You might choose not to invest in content around types of lighting, when in fact that could be an incredibly wonderful lead source. It could be the exact right keyword for you. It is getting way more search volume. We can see it right here. We can see it in Google Trends, which is showing us some real data, and we can back that up with our own clickstream data that we get here at Moz.

Number three, another problem, Google conflates keywords. So when I do searches and I start adding keywords to a list, unless I'm very careful and I type them in manually and I'm only using the exact ones, Google will take all three of these, "types of lights," "types of light" (singular light), and "types of lighting" and conflate them all, which is insane. It is maddening.

Why is it maddening? Because "types of light," in my opinion, is a physics-related search. You can see many of the results, they'll be from Energy.gov or whatever, and they'll show you the different types of wavelengths and light ranges on the visible spectrum. "Types of lights" will show you what? It will show you types of lights that you could put in your home or office. "Types of lighting" will show you lighting design stuff, the things that a lighting consultant might be interested in. So three different, very different, types of results with three different search intents all conflated in AdWords, killing me.

Number four, not only this, a lot of times when you do searches inside AdWords, they will hide the suggestions that you want the most. So when I performed my searches for "lighting design," Google never showed me — I couldn't find it anywhere in the search results, even with the export of a thousand keywords — "types of lights" or "types of lighting."

Why? I think it's the same reason down here, because Google doesn't believe that those are commercial intent search queries. Well, AdWords doesn't believe they're commercial intent search queries. So they don't want to show them to AdWords customers because then they might bid on them, and Google will (a) rarely show those, and (b) they'll get a poor return on that spend. What happens to advertisers? They don't blame themselves for choosing faulty keywords. They blame Google for giving them bad traffic, and so Google knocks these out.

So if you are doing SEO or you're doing content marketing and you're trying to find these targets, AdWords is a terrible suggestion engine as well. As a result, my advice is going to be rely on different tools.

Instead:

There are a few that I've got here. I'm obviously a big fan of Moz's Keyword Explorer, having been one of the designers of that product. Ahrefs came out with a near clone product that's actually very, very good. SEMrush is also a quality product. I like their suggestions a little bit more, although they do use AdWords keyword data. So the volume data might be misleading again there. I'd be cautious about using that.

Google Trends, I actually really like Google Trends. I'm not sure why Google is choosing to give out such accurate data here, but from what we've seen, it looks really comparatively good. Challenge being if you do these searches in Google Trends, make sure you select the right type, the search term, not the list or the topic. Topics and lists inside Google Trends will aggregate, just like this will, a bunch of different keywords into one thing.

Then if you want to get truly, truly accurate, you can go ahead and run a sample AdWords campaign, the challenge with that being if Google chooses not to show your ad, you won't know how many impressions you potentially missed out on, and that can be frustrating too.

So AdWords today, using PPC as an SEO tool, a content marketing tool is a little bit of a black box. I would really recommend against it. As long as you know what you're doing and you want to find some inspiration there, fine. But otherwise, I'd rely on some of these other tools. Some of them are free, some of them are paid. All of them are better than AdWords.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Yes, when you're running live campaigns, the numbers get more "precise," but in our experience, not always more accurate (as you can see from some of the comments here on WB Friday). The conflation problem doesn't go away, and we think Google's still smoothing out a year of data rather than giving the most accurate, predicted volumes for the month ahead (or the month prior).

SEMRush just changed (today) from using crawled AdWords data to using clickstream data (like Moz and Ahrefs) -- https://www.semrush.com/blog/new-semrush-data-fres... (we're still seeing some oddities in their rankings data in various geos, but I expect they'll work on that, too)

The MOST accurate data you can possibly get is still AdWords campaigns themselves. You run ads, and see the impression counts and if you have 99%+ impression share, you're likely getting the best available numbers. The problem here is that in most cases where Google doesn't think your ad is relevant or engaging enough, it won't show all the time (same is true in highly competitive keyword spaces). Thus, for SEO, this is a hard way to make things work.

Look forward to your thoughts/feedback, and thanks for all the great comments to date!

P.S. I also want to apologize for the pejorative use of the word "insane" in this video. I've had mental illness, family members have too, and there's no excuse for my not being more empathetic and thoughtful about my language choices. I'm very sorry and will be more attentive to this in the future.

The MOST accurate data you can possibly get is still AdWords campaigns themselves. You run ads, and see the impression counts and if you have 99%+ impression share, you're likely getting the best available numbers. The problem here is that in most cases where Google doesn't think your ad is relevant or engaging enough, it won't show all the time (same is true in highly competitive keyword spaces). Thus, for SEO, this is a hard way to make things work.

Specifically the problem where Google doesn't think your ad is relevant and it wont show and the reference to 99% impression share, are you suggesting that using the formula to find the missing percentage of impression share is significantly less accurate?

I find that as long as impression share is reasonably high with exact match keywords, say 70-80%, I can make pretty good predictions for my paid campaigns by finding the lost IS number.

Is there some other way that this ruins data for organic, or some mechanism you believe that Google uses without letting you know that your ad didn't show due to budget or rank?

Only one caveat to that -- the percentage that AdWords gives seems like its off a lot. That is, sometimes when you run a campaign that's shown 50% of the time, the impression count will triple or quadruple (or only go up 30%) when shown 99% of the time. I almost think Google might be playing fast and loose with the numbers (like they don't in search results counts).

I agree with RussJohnHop. If you access adwords data through an existing account the data is far FAR better. I've taken one account and run the keyword data against an "hypothetical" website for which I have existing data. We have done that a number of times. We do it to test adwords' accuracy.

Its not PERFECT. Its better. I frankly don't expect perfect. We actually use measures suggested by Rand. Its not perfect. Ultimately with adwords we've found once you set up an account you have to keep adjusting it.

Frankly one of the "Yugest" benefits from adwords is the keyword info you can then use for SEO targeting.

This is what I did: From one of the properties in GSC that I have access, I took keywords with a sustained number 1 position during november 2017 (that way the impressions are close to the search volume). Then I ask Adwords for the volume of those keywords (also from november 2017).

The results? THERE'S NO BIG DIFERENCE
BETWEEN THE ADWORDS DATA AND GSC DATA.

Not happy with that, I went to Analytics and checked the organic sessions from google and I compare that with the GSC total clicks value for the same site during the same month. Again, not a big difference (just the normal bounce rate difference and things like that).

Finally, I went to the Moz Keyword Explorer tool and I didn't even get volume for keywords with thousands or millions searches per month (according to Adwords and GSC). I went to SEMrush and I got the same result than Adwords (because as you said, SEMrush take the keywords data using the Adwords API). Sadly, I coudn't do it on Ahrefs because I don't have an account.

Conclusion: a) Google is lying to the world not just in Adwords, but in GSC and Analytics too, or b) there is something wrong with the method that you used or the analysis that you made.

PS: About Google Trends, certainly is a very useful tool for some tasks, but

1) "Interest over time" in fact is a relative value and is imposible to compare with search volume. Google says "Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. Likewise a score of 0 means the term was less than 1% as popular as the peak". Is not even saying that is connected with search volume, I think it is, but who knows for fact the formula? Maybe there's another(s) variable(s) inside.

2) Trends data can be even more misleading than Adwords data. Check this query (comparing the keywords "moz" and "semrush") in Trends, especially the keywords section of the page.

Why MOZ Keyword tool has gone so bad for India location? Couple of months back, we use to rely on the numbers from MOZ Pro but now the problem is, for even most competitive keywords you don't show data and as per my conversation with one of MOZ support guys, you heavily rely on US data source. Therefore, search volume for India geolocation is not accurate. Also, we are seeing same story in rank tracking in India specially for mobile rankings.

Appreciate, if you could look into the same. We too love to have a reliable tool (MOZ Pro) back on track.

I have the same issue. But I also have that issue with GKP which tells me something very popular has zero searches, which is very frustrating. I don't know which data source to use. Personally I have also had a similar problem with SemRush but Rand mentioned that they have changed their data sources so perhaps the data will be better.

I don't understand why India data is so neglected in general. India is such a massive business opportunity! If a platform ironed out issues with Indian data, all SEO companies in India would be onboard. And we know how many of those exist!

Another great video, Rand! Just had to comment on how enjoyable it is to watch your whiteboard friday videos, the information coupled with the passion (and fun) are addicting.

I found that some of the underlying info was very helpful in presenting my case for SEO over a strictly SEM approach- primarily that even with 99% impression share, your ad may not show up if google doesn't determine your term to be commercially significant.

Yes, agree. For one of our clients we've compared Google trends, Search Console and AdWords data (the more detailed AdWords data, not these wide ranges) and the # of impressions they get from Search Console roughly corresponds to the search volume bucket that the keywords are in, or it falls somewhere between the US and Worldwide search volume ranges. So it seems they show up maybe everywhere in the US + a portion of searches outside the US. Google Trends data does not always correspond, for example recently we had 3 terms that got roughly the same traffic according to Search Console and AdWords but one of them was much lower in Google trends.

However, I also agree with Rand when it comes to Google merging keywords together- that is becoming increasingly a problem from an SEO perspective. The keyword planner now lumps together words that sometimes have important distinctions (e.g. one is used to search for something branded / a website / YouTube channel, etc. and another is a more generic term), and sometimes two terms might be similar in terms of what you'd bid on for Paid but organically Google shows different pages (sometimes even different pages from the same site) for the keywords it lumps together. It is also a problem that they limit the # of words to 10 as people are increasingly asking longer questions and often the keyword planner will say there is no search volume, getting useful suggestions is sometimes impossible and it will just say there is nothing. So I'd definitely like to find a better tool for finding good long tail keywords.- Rianne

I completely agree. I would also probably use multiple data sources like you mentioned and compare to get the best results. I was making people aware that Google began restricting keyword planner data for non-advertisers in 2016. The (still vague) data is better if you have an existing advertising campaign.

Also agree with Rand on lumping keywords together into topics or themes. It definitely does lump them together. As for long tail keywords, I think the best way is to use data from an existing advertising campaign. There's not a great way otherwise, other than the extremely unreliable search analytics queries.

I also have to agree with your points, Eric (Rianne?). When I compare (the more detailed) Keyword Planner search volume data for a particular keyword (which, as you say, reasonably aligns with the impression data in Search Console) with the traffic I'm seeing in GA for my landing page corresponding to that keyword (factoring in my rank position & CTR), the numbers seem to hang together. I'd love to rely on Keyword Explorer (I'm a big fan of its other features), but it frequently returns volumes that seem impossibly low based on the clicks and organic traffic I'm getting for certain keywords.

But the keyword merging thing in Keyword Planner is driving me crazy. As others have said, you would think it would be in Google's interest to equip content creators with clear, accurate data about the topics its users are seeking answers on.

As someone who does SEO at a lighting company this was helpful from several different angles :) I can tell you the content difference between "light" and "lights" in this industry is a million miles wide.

My main frustration with conflating search volume numbers is that they do cause a content marketer to breeze over them and choose arbitrarily, and for those of us with limited keyword tracking ability they tend to choose one from each pot of similar words to spread the content out. To have a more accurate picture of the real value of that keyword and the real logic of it as a query is so important.

Our assumption has been that Google cares about user intent as much as we do, but from what you're saying their method of presenting those numbers doesn't affirm that.

I'm surprised that the Google Planner API wasn't mentioned. We're pulling our Keyword data through the Planner API and are getting both global and local monthly searches without the range.

But, I totally understand the point and when conducting a keyword research, we most definitely look at a few tools, specifically Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, Google, and SEMrush.

When all numbers are in front of you it's much easier to make a decision. I love the fact that just as Google, SimilarWeb is giving a Worldwide (Global) Keyword data, and not only per country as the rest. It's very important for many languages.

Last, I wish we'd all have a Keyword Index, that automatically takes an average from the top 4 tools. Could save a lot of time!

Big fan of Google Trends here. I use the types as a layered approach: first looking at a more global interest on a broader topical term ('List'), then refining into more specific keyword ('Search Term') queries to check out the the lingo people within that niche are preferring.

On the AdWords granularity: sometimes I even wonder whether google is making it so bad on purpose, to get more accidentally spent dollars. Anyway, whatever the reason, it does show that the Search and the Ads teams within Google are separated from each other, which is only healthy I assume.

If you have an active AdWords currently running you will be presented with more specific volume numbers, as opposed to the large data ranges if you do not.

Additionally, to comment on Rand's point on competition in the video - if you download your data the competition field (Low, Medium or High) will be converted into a more practical decimal number (0.28 for example). This is a better indicator on how competitive a search term is, or will be, on AdWords.

I am seeing also some wild number that sometimes doesn't make sense in the queries report. E.g. a keyword has 170 search volme in kw planner. i get about 20 a month on 3rd page, i move to 2nd page still the same

Thank you, Rand, for this mind-illuminating Whiteboard Friday! May I suggest you another keyword research tool, which give fairly accurate search volume and competition data: KWFinder. Five queries in 24 hours are free, then you've gotta pay for it.

And: By using the word INSANE at the end of each section, you remind me of the famous Sahra Wagenknecht, who used the same word in an analysis of the banking crisis of 2007 ("Wahnsinn mit Methode", which means "systematic insanity"). :)

Great topic, Rand. Despite the data discrepancies, I hate to admit I occasionally rely on Google AdWords for convenience sake as you're able to get keyword volume in bulk. My typical research process involves aggregating keywords from various sources into a master list and then pasting into a single tool for bulk volume. Do you have any recommendations for tools that cater to this particular process?

Well this is not a new story and I completely agree that relying on adwords data will be the first mistake which content marketer might fall in. I wonder why you've not included Bing's keywords tool, yes it has some limitations for low volume searches but it's quite handy especially knowing that google now shows in ranges, I wonder how accurate is the data shown by bing ads

Amazing.. as soon as i saw this video i pretty much trashed a keyword research i have been working on for the past few days.. my method until now was uber/suggest/related>>keyword planner (competition/volume)>keyword planner, i guess i need a new strategy

I had earlier mentioned in my comments that Google data is never reliable, be it google adwords, webmaster or analytics. I was contested by some people that data is reliable for adwords.

However, Google data gives you an outline idea to set up SEO / SEM campaigns, it never confirms the keyword searches coming from organic data. Most reliable reliable data comes the SEM campaigns since you are spending money there and need to see exact information where the money is being used.

We have used many test cases, wherein we asked people to use a specific term from various locations and different PCs/laptops/mobiles to search specific keywords and visit a specific website against it. We could see each and every user in real-time on analytics but the information captured for the keyword used (in webmaster / analytics) and the search engine used were never close to the real data. However, we did see a move up in the rankings of the website for that specific search term, it confirms that the google works like a puzzle , and one needs to work closely to understand the clues and use them to their own advantage.

I think right at the end you touched on what is the crux of the issue, AdWords keyword planner is for PPC - it groups things in a sort of weird PPC logic which doesn't really mesh with SEO, in fact as I understand it the AdWords and Organic teams basically don't talk.

But I would really push back on the idea that its not very useful, particularly if you have a high enough Ad spend for the traffic figures to be more accurate.

I can relate to the problem of misleading Keyword Planner data, but I think what you mentioned about keyword suggestions in Adwords is even worse. You're right, I found that 90-95% of the times the keywords suggested were going to be a total waste of money.

Yes! Like I noted in my comment on the post, the precision gets better, but the conflation and monthly smoothing issues do not, which is why I'm still very skeptical and still see lots of true counts (from active campaigns for keywords) with very different impression numbers than what the predictions counts are.

Hi, thanks for the great video. i really enjoy the white board Friday videos.

All these tools you mentioned, apart from SEMrush, require to initially come up with your own keywords and then plug them in to get results. I have performed my Keyword research about 7 months ago using SEMrush which allowed me to input my domain and provided related keywords and related information, these were based on organic competitors.

Is there another tool which provides keyword data, in bulk, based on domains/organic competitors?

Thanks for the video, Rand. I am currently planning out our content topics for this year, and I'm a little ashamed to say that I've always used KW Planner as my go-to research tool. I hadn't really questioned the accuracy of it (since we're running ads so don't suffer the issue with the huge search volume ranges). This has really opened my eyes, thank you!

I think it's important to point out here the value of progressive strategy (rather than tools). Tools will always be changing. Start with the resources you have whether it's semrush, ahrefs, moz, adwords, or search console. Measure KPI's and revise.

Wonder if this has been relayed to a Google Adwords sub-team yet haha. I'm going to submit a suggestion to SEMRush as well. Thanks for validating a thought I've had for a while. Happy to hear trends can be a bit more accurate when used carefully.

In my ad word campaign i am using no. of keywords in many ad-groups but not getting satisfactory result. So i am agree with the title of this blog that google shoring search volume in adwords tool its is really unreliable.

After 12 years at search, Google doesn't give you real numbers because they don't want you to have them. No different then Bing. Or even audience number on Facebook. If they were real then competitors would scrap them and use it to competitor analysis. Always take then with a grain of salt and nothing works better then real campaigns in the wild.

Nice post! Time ago I was concerned because the predictions of the Adwords Keyword Tool, doesn´t match with the impression showed on the dashboard of the Adwords performance. I ´ve read in the Screaming Frog blog about some ways to use that Adwords tool to get more a acurate data. In my case that method worked well, but do you know if it´s acurate enough?

Enjoyed this! I use a combination of Keyword Planner, Keyword Explorer and manual SERP analysis.

Re Google Trends for point 2, the tool apparetly shows popularity of a term(s), not exact search volume.

"Interest over time

Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. Likewise a score of 0 means the term was less than 1% as popular as the peak."

The only issue I currently have with KWE is that a lot of the keywords I analyse are still showing 'No data'. I guess that will improve over time?

Excellent WBF detailing how inaccurate The Adwords Volume estimations are. Besides running a campaign, another method of estimating volume is looking at the search impressions in Google Search Console for words that you do not rank on the first page.

Very helpful. Not something I had really been thinking with, as it was just standard practice for us to use this tool at my workplace when I was training, but I am going to look more into these other tools. We had been using it to successfully drive traffic to the content we were creating, but being better able to get accurate data is going to refine that. Thank you!

Without real competition, and without any other data about their ad platform, they can kinda do what they want and not worry about the consequences. e.g. their counts of search results have been wildly inaccurate forever, but it never stopped them from dominating the search engine market.

Sistrix is good too for all European markets, but a very different process of creating their database of keywords to follow and track.

In Italian the best one is a local SEO suite: SEOZoom.

PD: Keyword Explorer (the Moz one) as improved in relation to not English words to be honest. I appreciated this improvement in the last couple of months when I used it a lot for two audits I did. Especially improved are all the keywords suggestions.

I find it telling that SEO tools are not very transparent about where their numbers come from. After reading this I researched the tool we use and other comparable tools and the only clues came from knowledgeable blogs doing product reviews. The ability to boast competition levels and search volume numbers as unique product elements is apparently more valuable than the Adwords name, go figure.

Just gotta keep adding grains of salt to my data before I do anything with it, I suppose.

Hi all. I have nothing to add to the conversation, I simply wanted to say thank you.

I use KW Planner for other KW ideas, then run those ideas through Moz KW Explorer, etc.

I have a lot of trouble with keyword research for organic content marketing. I am a lawyer, practising in one area of law, in Queensland Australia. Search volumes are usually very small and return "no data" to my queries a lot of the time.

100% correct today one can't just rely Adwords, specially when there is no Ads running at all. For me Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahref are better source of right keywords for campaign! Yes sometime I do take ref. from Search console to understand what way the search engine and user are treating the website.